In article <[email hidden]>,
(Tai) said:I bought a Marin steel - ok, Thron cro-mo - road bike a few years ago
and notice Marin now have aluminum road bikes, at least at the
low-end. Looking at other bike makes, the selection of cro-mo road
bikes under $1K is getting smaller. I know aluminum bikes are a
little lighter, but are consumers making the choice to go to alum
and/or the makers finding alum bikes more profitable?
Aluminum has almost no price disadvantage over steel now, for various
mass-production reasons. Since an Al frame can usually be made a little
lighter*, all but the very cheapest new bicycles default to Aluminum.
And since some of the most expensive and lightest bikes are also made of
Al, you get some cachet rubbing off on your "7005 ALUMINUM" Wal-bike.
Quoted message said:Wondering where steel bikes are going,
Tai
They're just resting. I have been known to pay as much as $10 for a
complete lugged road bike at a garage sale. I grabbed a half-decent 70s
vintage Italian lugged frame out of a pile of garbage last week; I don't
even know what I'm going to do with it, since it's pretty but I have
lots of steel frames already.
Unless you have some very specific reasons for it (you want a special
geometry or it's the cheapest way to get the components you want), I
don't see a keen need to buy a new steel frame. If I was willing to
spend a few hours looking, I could probably bring home a decent-quality
lugged steel road frame every weekend, in most cases as complete 25-year
old bike, for $10 or less. Modern steel, especially in welded,
non-lugged frames, might have a slight weight advantage, but it's on the
order of a pound at most. I ride a mid-range Pinarello with indifferent
(105, Sora) componentry, and it weighs only 22 pounds all in.
Quoted message said:P.S. I wasn't really asking for the pros and cons of steel vs.
aluminum, but more about market and consumer, um, dynamics at the
low-end of bike sales. :-)
The Taiwanese factories are very good at aluminum fabrication, and the
price difference between raw steel and raw Al is not high. All the
economic forces push towards defaulting to Al. Only very cheap (and
mostly children's) bikes now use steel on the low end of the market. At
the high end, you get into custom fabrication or companies marketing the
cachet and positive attributes (repairability, beauty, magnets stick to
it, etc.) of high-end steel construction. The middle is owned by Al.
*I have a theory that whatever the relative merits of steel and Al for
road frames, mountain bikes have a heavy natural bias towards aluminum
because an Al frame built strongly enough to have a reasonable fatigue
life will also be able to take relatively high one-time loads. By
comparison, steel construction means not worrying about the fatigue life
(which can be assumed to be nearly infinite if you don't exceed the
yield strength), but that means you are building a bike with a lower
ultimate tensile strength in the places where bike frames can fail. Road
bikes don't get into a lot of super-high-load situations unless they're
being crashed, but mountain bikes tend to get jumped, crashed, and
dropped routinely. Does that make sense?
--
Ryan Cousineau, [email hidden] http://www.sfu.ca/~rcousine/wiredcola/
President, Fabrizio Mazzoleni Fan Club
